


for a thousand more

by brophigenia



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Cunnilingus, D/s undertones, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, First Time, Getting Together, Grinding, Kinda, Kinda?, Original Vampire Caroline Forbes, Possessive Klaus, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension, a gratuitous and inaccurate waltz through history, and then resolved sexual tension, but then i couldn't find a way to put porn in it, dominant klaus, frenemies to lovers, i have so many outtakes, possessive caroline, the google doc was 50 pages long, they were gonna be at the boston tea party, whatever, yes it takes them a thousand years to fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 02:37:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17737409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: It takes a millennia, but Klaus and Carolinedoeventually get over themselves.(AKA, Caroline is an Original, Klaus is insufferable, and it takes them like, an entire millennia to do something about it.)





	for a thousand more

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Angelikah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angelikah/gifts).



> Ahhh okay so I loved writing this. I got to rewatch the Borgias, Marie Antoinette, Turn, Hamilton, Gone With the Wind, all my faves. Original Caroline is a force to be reckoned with for sure. 💕

**Mystic Falls, 992**

 

The sky had been much clearer when Caroline was young. The world had been  _ cleaner,  _ no light pollution and no smog to erase the stars from the night sky. She loved those stars. She had always loved the daylight, blessed gift from the gods it was, but there was something  _ special  _ about the night that had always called to her. She could remember, if she strained her magic-veiled mind, being a very small child with a crudely-made dolly on one arm, wandering the woods. Lost but unafraid. 

She’d not known to be afraid of the dark, then. 

(She learned, in time, that she  _ should be  _ afraid. 

Caroline had never been very good at doing what she  _ should,  _ though.) 

She’d been born in a warm little hall on a pile of scraped furs, brought into the world by a shieldmaiden blonde and bellowing, midwifed by witches and squalling from moment one, demanding to be paid attention to. Caroline Willemdöttir, born to a village woman and her reluctant merchant husband.  _ Trouble,  _ her mother would always tease her,  _ from the very start.  _

The world was cleaner and simpler then, and nothing mattered much except honoring the gods and surviving the winters, which were bone-shattering cold and dangerous and  _ long.  _ She spent all her time working, all seventeen years she lived in the village spent weaving or milking or gardening or skinning the kills her mother brought home from the hunt. 

She’d been the loveliest girl in the village, to be sure— it was not a boast to say so. Everyone agreed. She was even more admired than sweet Tatia, than young golden-haired Rebekah Mikaelson.  _ Caroline, our own Lady Freya!  _ the village elders would say, dotingly, every feast day when she would weave flowers into crowns for the village children and tend the bonfires because she loved to be helpful and to be admired for being helpful. 

Life would have carried on like that, until she married. Until she bore her husband as many children as possible. Until she died after a long, peaceful life spent managing a small hovel, surrounded by children and grandchildren. Grey haired and wrinkled and  _ exhausted,  _ but joyous. 

Life would have carried on like that, except that her golden hair and shining laugh and lapis-lazuli eyes caught the attention of  _ all  _ the men in the village. 

_ All  _ the men, including one Niklaus Mikaelson. 

And this was where the story of Caroline Willemdöttir’s life diverged, warped. Became not a footnote of a footnote of a footnote in history, forgotten, but history itself. Myth. Fairytale. Legend. 

 

***

 

“Niklaus is different than the others, Mikael,” Esther whispered to her husband, curving her hands over his cheeks and, as always, trying not to compare the breadth of his shoulders and the beauty of his grim warrior’s face to Ansel’s. Her wolf. She saw so much of him in Klaus, her most troubled son.  _ Her  _ son, the only one of the lot who truly was  _ hers,  _ and hers  _ alone.  _ “He will need someone. He will need a  _ companion.”  _

“And are his siblings not enough?” Mikael asked her, belligerent to a fault. Argumentative for the sake of it. “Why do we not make immortal brides for each of our sons, a deathless husband for Rebekah, then, if we must do so for Niklaus?” He sneered the name in a way that sent a bolt of pain to her heart; how had she allowed this hatred, this animosity to brew in her own family? 

(Sometimes, Esther wondered if somewhere, deep down, Mikael knew the truth. If his finely-honed instincts made him aware in his marrow that Niklaus was not of his get, was a cuckoo crouched in his nest, amongst his own blood children.) 

“Mikael, you know that what I am saying is correct. The others will fare fine, but Niklaus…” she sighed and leant their heads together, breathing in the smoke-blood scent of her husband. The suggestion she pushed into his heart was small, niggling, but shot true. 

She thought of the girl she had chosen— the golden-haired young Brynhildr to her sweet Niklaus’ Sigurd.  _ Caroline,  _ who Niklaus always had a tender gaze for, quick to laugh and easy to smile. She was the sort of girl that Niklaus, prone to black moods and melancholy, needed. Uncomplicated, beautiful, shining, like a polished gemstone. 

A simple girl. A loving one. 

Mikael sighed, and Esther hid her smile in his throat as she embraced him, victorious. 

Niklaus would not be alone. Not even if he spurned his siblings. 

 

***

 

Caroline could not remember coming to the Mikaelson home.

She’d been sent by her mother to gather flowers— blue ones, the kind that grew in the eastern side of the forest, and her mother had not told her  _ why  _ but Caroline knew quite well it was to make dye for a new dress. A present, for her, to be worn at the next Uppsala. Her mother always admired her best when she wore blue. 

She could remember being sent out, taking a basket and wrapping herself in a cloak to shield her from the cool evening air. She could remember singing under her breath as she walked. She could remember coming upon— 

upon Esther. 

Esther, wife of Mikael, whose gaze she had always avoided and whose powers were dark legends. 

Esther, the witch. 

“What is happening?” She asked, shaking herself from her daze and gazing up at the warlord Mikael, who stood above where she was prostrated with a heavy chalice and a knife. They surrounded her— the Mikaelson children, kneeling with dazed expressions on their own faces. Dazed expressions and scarlet mouths. 

“Drink,” Mikael said, his voice heavy and low, ringing with authority. He had eyes like she imagined Odin must have— grim eyes, weapons themselves, that promised retribution if their aim was not met. 

Caroline had been raised to fear the gods, to honor them, to do as she was asked. 

She had not been raised to disobey. 

So, hazy and kneeling and frightened on the floor of a hut, surrounded by half-strangers, Caroline drank. 

And, scarlet-mouthed, she died. 

 

***

 

(Her first memory in this damned life is the sound of Niklaus’ frantic consolation of his sister; the sight of his hands upon her hair, gentler than one might handle a newly-hatched sparrow. He is all love in that first memory, even with blood in his teeth, upon his white shirt. She ached watching him comfort Rebekah, not yet fully transformed. She ached and wished for those gentle hands to soothe  _ her,  _ too.) 

 

***

 

“We are monsters,” Caroline whispered, crouching before the fire next to Niklaus, cold and numb all over save for the burning thirst gathering all down her throat, thirst she could feel all through her body even as she could feel her newly-bestowed strength, too. 

“My mother made you for me. A monstrous bride.” Niklaus said, the longest sentence he’d spoken since his father had bound him in the woods and his mother had bound him with her magic, tearing some vital piece from his soul that meant he no longer could heed the call of the moon but instead felt its loss all the more keenly, growing more mad by the day. Cagey, like a wounded animal not long for the world, except that they were now deathless, pitiable creatures. 

“I am no  _ bride,” _ Caroline corrected him, and felt revulsion rising in her at the thought of perverting a wedding ceremony in such a way— standing in all her bloodied glory and pretending to be a maid, full of promise and virtue. Ready to create life.

She was full of nothing now but vitriol and poison and  _ blood.  _ So much blood. 

“It is your fault that I have been damned to this fate!” She hissed, all that monstrous rage rising unexpectedly, coming close enough that he could smell the sweetness of freshly-spilled blood on her breath. It was the closest anyone had been to him since his true nature, his true  _ parentage,  _ was revealed. “It is  _ your fault! _ I did not ask for this! If you weren’t so terribly  _ unlovable—“  _ she cut herself off and tried to whirl away, hands clasped over her mouth in an attempt to either smother herself or keep back the blackness that wanted to spill forth from her charred, furious heart. 

Niklaus did not allow her to turn from him, instead keeping a grip on her that would’ve broken bones, had she been human. He would’ve never thought of touching her thus, had  _ he  _ been human. The simple village boy who had loved her from afar for so long was gone, replaced by a yellow-eyed demon that wanted only to rend what it was not given. 

Around a mouthful of sharp teeth he spoke, low and full of amused malice. It did not mask the hurt in his tone, only emphasized it. “Yes, how terrible a fate… to never die, to be all-powerful, to be a god walking this earth… how  _ terrible.”  _ He drew her closer to him as he spoke, and the hairs on the back of her neck prickled, standing up. “My mother thought to gift you to me, so that I may never be alone. How  _ misguided _ she was.” 

“I am not a  _ gift.”  _ Caroline growled, and tasted phantom bile rising in her throat with the implication of it. The implication of what Esther had done. An eternity. An  _ eternity  _ with Niklaus, with a monster.  _ As  _ a monster. 

“I cannot even  _ look  _ at you!” She cried, and quick as a flash twisted from his grip. 

“And I can barely stand the sight of  _ you,”  _ Niklaus bared his teeth. 

_ Would that you were never born,  _ Caroline thought venomously, and wished it was night so she could flee into the forest and find solace there, in the dark among the beasts and the stars. 

She settled for crouching in the furthest corner from him, and not looking in his direction. He took out his knife and whittled at one of the wood chips left by the fire. 

“Will we have to put up with these dramatics forever?” Kol could be heard to murmur to Elijah, who only sighed. 

 

***

 

**Southern France, 1002**

 

The fine gown felt unsettling on her skin, softer than clothing had any right to be, lulling her into feeling softer, too. Feeling less… accusatory. Less frantic. Less concerned with  _ survival,  _ as she had been even  _ before  _ they became these accursed, hunted things. Rebekah slipped easily into the mask of the noblewoman, but Caroline was uneasy even playing dress-up, much less being guided into this farce by the mortal boy. The castle was a representation of everything they'd grown up without; if they had had walls to hide behind, if Henrik Mikaelson had not been savaged by werewolves, would they even be in this mess? Living this horror? 

 

***

 

“You think we fool them? That  _ you  _ fool them?” Caroline murmured, and her tongue was all acid, her throat burning with  _ thirst,  _ no matter that she was plenty sated by the blood she’d consumed just that morning. She thirsted because she raged, because she looked at that red-haired little  _ wretch  _ and itched to tear her limb from limb. 

Klaus didn’t notice, which was the only small blessing to be found in the whole damned mess that this ruse had become. Caroline clutched her own impartiality and coolness like a child might clutch a favorite blanket, and she burned only on the inside, with a fire like nothing she’d ever felt before. 

_ (Jealousy.) _

Aurora. What a hateful name. What a hateful girl. 

“They see what they wish to,” Niklaus told her, dismissive, and Caroline burned inside, thinking of the sight she’d spied, him burying his face into the crook of that awful girl-child’s throat and burying  _ himself  _ into the ruinous abyss hidden beneath her fine, fine skirts. “They will see your jealousy as well,  _ sister.”  _ The ruse they had plotted, that Caroline was not some unrelated, unmarried woman traveling with the lot of them but instead another Mikaelson, sister to them all, made her skin crawl. She felt no  _ kinship  _ to Niklaus. “Do your part, as the rest of us are, and there shall be no cause for alarm.” 

He did not move to touch her, console her, as he might’ve done with Rebekah or that  _ girl.  _ She was no fragile woman to him but a monster just as capable of violence as he. 

(The thought thrilled the beast inside her breast and made the maiden in her despair.) 

“I hate you.” She murmured tonelessly, and listened to his laugh with a wince concealed by staring off in the opposite direction. 

“I know.” He told her, and with a single tug of her hair he was gone, off to no doubt wreak more havoc. He was worse than Kol, sometimes. 

(All the time.) 

She did not watch him go, but listened with bated breath as he left, each long stride taking him further away from her, a relief almost palpable coupled with a jealous resentment she could feel like a bezoar in her gut. 

 

***

 

“I’m leaving.” Caroline said, gazing out over the ramparts, shoulder-to-shoulder with Elijah, whose face seemed grimmer than usual. 

He looked at her with eyes that wanted to weep, as he always looked at her.  _ Not our blood,  _ he’d said once of her,  _ but tied to us with blood.  _ She had no illusions about his loyalties; Elijah would fling her into a pit of vipers if it came down between her and any of his siblings, but beyond them, there was none in the waking world that Elijah would champion above her. 

It was a comforting thought. 

“I am confident that we shall be leaving soon as well.” He told her, and rested a gentle hand on the back of her head for a brief moment, a comfort purely platonic,  _ almost  _ fraternal. 

“Niklaus will never forgive you for what you’ve done.” She whispered, barely audible upon the wind, and Elijah was not surprised. Finn and Kol persisted with their belief that Caroline —and Rebekah— were somehow less keen for their lack of manhood. Elijah suffered under no such delusions. 

“And I,” Elijah murmured, “will never forgive him for what  _ he  _ has done.” 

  
  


***

 

**Rome, 1497**

 

“Signorina Forbes!” Cardinal Borgia cried, pretending to be soused with wine, and with a beringed hand drew her close enough to lay a kiss upon her cheek, terribly close to her lips. He was horrifically handsome. Caroline could see why he was called the most beautiful man in Italy; there was something preternatural about it, about the symmetry of his features, the lushness of his black curls and the silken-softness of his full lips. He would make a fair immortal, if she didn’t think he would bring the sky falling down upon their ears for it. 

He had very sad eyes, dark as coals in his handsome face; he did not look across the room at the bride and her new husband unless he was  _ certain _ no one was observing the way his mouth drew tight and his shoulders went taut. 

Caroline laughed, light and flirtatious, and allowed him to trace a finger down her throat, admiring wordlessly the rope of pearls looped there, a gift from some admirer or another. They matched the pearls beaded into her snood, pierced through her earlobes, even sewn into her slippers. The extravagance of Roman fashion never ceased to thrill her; she loved Rome, with all of its artists and clergy, noblewomen and backstabbers, princes and thieves. The intrigue of the Vatican had her whirring, immortal mind in raptures. One could never be bored in Rome. 

“I will expect a dance before the night is through,” the Cardinal told her, and then went off, presumably to slip into some alcove with his murderess of a little sister, the bride in question, intent upon gossip and stolen kisses. What moral decay these men of the cloth were capable of; Caroline had been killing and pillaging for centuries, and yet found herself scandalized by this city, supposedly the most  _ holy _ of all. 

“May I have  _ this  _ dance, Signorina Forbes?” A man purred in her ear, and she very nearly choked upon her wine, for there was no other man in the world whose voice sounded like Niklaus Mikaelson’s, and so there was no other man in the world it could be, whispering like a lover to her, except Niklaus Mikaelson. 

She composed herself and turned, arcing one golden brow. “Signor, I am afraid I cannot dance with you.” She murmured, keeping her cover as the docile young daughter of a dead Milanese nobleman, not attracting attention for anything but her lovely golden hair, the likes of which not even lye-rinsed Lucrezia Borgia could boast. It amused him, she could see; he looked at her, studded in precious stones, as if she were a giant precious stone, herself. 

“Why, pray tell?” His eyes danced with mirth and madness, and Caroline refused to even entertain the thought that she had  _ missed _ those eyes, that smirk, the  _ smell  _ of him, wild and earthy and clean as mint leaves. 

“You are no gentleman.” She told him, and adopted a haughty look to hide her simmering amusement.  

“No,” he agreed with her, speaking again directly into her ear, indecently close, “I am a monster sent straight from Dante’s hell.” He laughed once, a bark of a thing. “But then,  _ my love, _ so are you.” He said  _ my love  _ like an insult and an endearment, a mockery and a benediction. 

She disguised her answering smile with a twitch of her fan, laying a hand upon Niklaus’ proffered forearm, and allowed him to lead her into the dance. He was light on his feet, but then he had always been— swordplay and dancing were not too different, after all; she had hardly to think of the steps, Niklaus was so adept at leading her through them. 

“Shall we adjourn to the balcony?” She asked him once the dance was through, conscious of the eyes upon them, curious courtiers and scheming statesmen making a note of a dark-eyed stranger dancing with a chaste noblewoman. 

“Lead the way,” Niklaus purred. 

 

***

 

“Where have you been, all this time?” Niklaus asked, unaccusing. 

“Like you don’t know,” Caroline said with a scoff, leaning on the balcony and staring out over the city. Rome at night was so beautiful— the air clear and the people all around them asleep, except for those skulking and partying into the night with the men of God inside, breaking commandments by the handful. What beautiful hypocrisy. Mortals were endlessly fascinating. How laughable, she often considered, that she had to become  _ immortal  _ to realize this. 

He laughed, an uncomplicated sound of frustration and amusement. He looked… tired. Slump-shouldered, like he was letting his guard down. She was pleased at the notion that he trusted her enough to do so, but would have rather taken off her daylight ring at high noon in the city square than admit it out loud. “I love it here,” she said instead. “I love going to church and listening to the singing, the chanting. It is all so beautiful, and yet so…” She could not find the right word, and pondered it for a long moment, interrupted by Niklaus. 

“Savage.” He supplied, and somehow that  _ was _ what she’d meant- the condemnation, the imagery of hell, which stood in for the Hel of their shared childhood religion but was not the abundant place that  _ their _ Hel was meant to have been. No, this hell was full of torture and brimstone; men of this Christian religion were full of terror in their bellies at the thought of it, trembling in their beds at night, willing to do  _ anything _ to secure their passage to heaven. 

_ (Anything.)  _

She smiled just a bit at him, as if to say  _ yes, that,  _ and felt again the strange kinship that had always existed between them, the odd sense of understanding. Even when she was newly-turned and rawboned and  _ furious,  _ she had always understood him. Innately, they could sense each others’ moods, thoughts, wishes. Perhaps that was something Esther had done- the witch had maybe taken hold of the tail ends of their souls and braided them together, inexorable. Whatever it was, it did not guarantee them amity but instead made sure they could never be strangers. 

She caught herself dwelling on this and huffed a bit, ridiculing her own fancifulness. 

“I’m going home. To bed.” She told him, and gathered her skirts around herself, bracing to go through the dark streets alone, among the thieves and orphans whose throats she would not set her teeth to. 

(Not tonight, anyway.)

Niklaus grinned in the dark, wolfish, dimpled. “May I escort you there?” 

She ought to say  _ no.  _ She ought to say  _ no  _ and go home and pack up all the things she did not care to leave behind and then go somewhere far, far away. 

“Yes, fine.” She said, and took his arm, leaning a bit more heavily upon him than was strictly necessary. 

 

***

 

“I have heard rumors.” Caroline murmured, knowing full well he could hear her across the room. Klaus sat in an armchair before the fire, enjoying its warmth and watching her over a cup of wine as her maid unlaced every fastening on her complicated gown. She’d lost her modesty even before becoming a vampire, and so did not think about minding his gaze. She’d compelled the girl long ago to never ask questions and never tell anyone what went on beyond the walls of this villa; there was nothing to worry about, beyond her own weakness. 

She’d decided many centuries ago that she would never give in to Niklaus Mikaelson’s charms; did the same apply for this new creature, this _Klaus,_ as he’d asked her to call him during their walk, who was a far cry from the illiterate village boy he’d been? This man, cultured and draped in wealth? 

She was a whole new creature, herself. Did the same rules apply? 

“Rumors?” Klaus asked, and swirled his glass. He turned to look at the flames. Still, she knew he saw her from the corner of his sharp eyes. 

“That you found another Tatia. A girl wearing her face.  _ Katarina…” _ The name tasted sweet, and it had Klaus’ whole body stiffening up, rage coming softly onto his fine features. Almost gentle, well-worn.  _ Intoxicating. _ She’d missed his anger, which matched her own, though these days hers was more deeply-buried beneath her hedonistic desire to be fulfilled, to be wooed by every sight, to be pleasured in her consumption of fine jewelry and sweet wines and mortal flesh. 

(And blood. Always blood.) 

“Katarina Petrova.” Klaus said, like the taste of the name was acid on his silver tongue, and Caroline breathed out fully as she was finally released from the bonds of her corsetry, standing in her gauzy shift, which had gone transparent in the firelight. She dismissed the maid with a flutter of her fingers and went to take Klaus’ goblet of wine, drinking deeply. “A doppelgänger. A shade of Tatia. Conniving where she was sweet, selfish where she was loving. You can imagine what the whole mess has done to Elijah.” 

She winced, thinking of him, of the torture he must have felt seeing Tatia’s face again, at realizing the false copy’s duplicity. At having to choose between what must have seemed like a second chance and Klaus’ endless bloodlust, his bottomless fury. Elijah, bound to suffer as none the rest of them did. 

“Sit with me,” he requested, and Caroline, lulled by wine and her own exhaustion, allowed herself to be tugged down into Klaus’ lap, perched upon his knee. Her head fit perfectly beneath his chin, and he was so warm through her chemise from the firelight that it made her boneless, fingers curled into the rich fabric of his doublet. “I needed her blood. Katarina’s. I am half-mad with it, Caroline.”  _ It  _ being the Sun and Moon Curse- she knew it well without having to hear of it for the  _ thousandth _ time. She knew that with each full moon he grew more and more pained, more and more terrorized. 

“I missed you, Nik.” She whispered, almost inaudible. Vulnerable the way she never had allowed herself to be with him, but had secretly yearned to be since she’d awoken on the floor of a hovel and seen him cradling his sister to his bloody chest. 

Klaus hummed, a sound pure with pleasure. A golden tone of a thing. “As I missed you, love.” 

She believed him, because he spoke it in the low tone he only ever had used with her, and smiled the boyish smile she adored almost as much as his animalistic snarl. 

She woke the next morning in bed, tucked carefully beneath the duvets. On the nightstand, Klaus had left a sketch of her, roughly-hewn in charcoal but almost unnaturally precise. Beautiful. She tucked it into the same box that housed the few other keepsakes she wished to hang on to and pressed her face into the upholstery of the chair he’d sat upon the night before, inhaling. 

(A scent uniquely  _ Klaus.)  _

She dressed for mass in half a daze, thinking of him. He wouldn’t be back. She wouldn’t see him for a long time, not while the doppelgänger still eluded him. 

The thought was oddly bitter in her mind, bringing a thorny taste to her mouth. 

She needed to feed. A good hunt would make her feel better. Make her forget. 

At least until the next time they crossed paths. 

  
  


***

 

**Paris, 1673**

 

“Monsieur Forbes! How good to see you!” Caroline turned to greet her colleague, smiling beneath her faux whiskers. 

“Monsieur Thierry, my good man!” She bellowed, adopting the lowered pitch that was an integral part of her disguise. “How are your experiments upon the body’s humours proceeding?” The round little man lit up and he toddled to catch up to her, chattering on and on about bleeding veins and leeches and such. Caroline hemmed and hawed at appropriate intervals and reveled in the freedom that came from the wearing of trousers. 

It was a grating sort of annoyance that in order to be a part of the Academy of Sciences she had to dress as a man, but Caroline had spent the last hundred years chasing a wild rabbit through every corner of mortal academia she could find. A false set of whiskers and a stuffed codpiece were  _ hardly  _ the worst thing she’d put up with in her pursuit of knowledge, of understanding. 

They came into the library engrossed in conversation; Caroline did not notice the new face amongst them until she  _ noticed him,  _ eyes gone wide and shoulders straightening sharply. 

“Monsieur Mikaelson!” Thierry shrieked, and made a flourishing gesture that encompassed Klaus Mikaelson's… well,  _ everything.  _

“Thierry,” Klaus said, nodding his head. The starched ruff attached to his doublet rustled as he did. Caroline felt a phantom flutter in her stomach, swallowing thickly. His eyes danced. “And _you,”_ he said, slowly, turning his bright gaze onto Caroline. “Must be the _famous..._ _Monsieur_ Forbes.” 

Oh, she  _ despised  _ him. 

“Enchanté,” she mumbled, and sketched a half-mocking bow. 

“Monsieur Mikaelson comes to us from— now, where exactly did you say you were from, again, Monsieur Mikaelson?” Thierry babbled, eyes glassy with compulsion. Caroline rolled her own eyes, but concealed it by pretending to be engrossed in Lucette's latest star maps, crossing the room and tracing her gloved fingers over constellations she’d once known by heart, making up stories about them in the dark woods to mask her childish loneliness. 

She could feel Klaus’ gaze on her back. 

 

***

 

Klaus was following her. 

Caroline strode through the halls with her head held high, pretending not to notice or care that he was there. She could make longer strides in this ensemble than she could in skirts and petticoats and a damnable  _ corset,  _ but she could not outrun him unless she pushed herself into supernatural levels of speed, which would have felt like running. 

Caroline was not going to run. 

Klaus caught her by the wrist as she went to round a corner towards a more well-populated wing of the palace, tugging her around to face him. 

“I had heard you were in Paris,” he murmured, lips curving like the cat who devoured the canary. Like he was the former and she was the latter. Like  _ himself,  _ and like she had surprised him, and like he adored her for it. 

“And as you see, here I am.” Caroline said stoutly, tossing her head in a gesture too feminine to suit her current disguise. “Though why  _ you  _ are here, I’m sure I have no idea.” 

Klaus looked down at her in her breeches and coat and he  _ laughed,  _ laughed like a small child who has found simple and golden entertainment in something novel, laughed and then was upon her, pressing her into the wall of the long hallway and tugging her whiskers down, away, until he could gaze upon her naked face. They were so close together that she had to breathe in counterpoint to him, else she not have room to inhale. The thinness of her breeches meant that she could feel the heat of him on her inner thighs in a way entirely new. Her cheeks were red with it; she felt very, very alive. 

“You are a  _ marvel,”  _ he whispered hotly in her ear, wrenching her legs further apart so he could press himself fully between them, bolder than he had ever been.  _ Improper,  _ except she was not of this century, this  _ millennia, _ and neither was he, and they were both born in the wild, they were both created beneath the stars, she was an  _ animal,  _ a  _ beast,  _ not a lady. Not even a gentleman, despite her costuming. “A  _ marvel,  _ Caroline—“ the rigid length of him pressed against her and she gasped at the feeling, somehow sweeter than her own fingers or the attentions of the mortal men she’d taken to bed in the last few centuries. Somehow he was better than all of that, even with their clothes on and his hands buried in her powdered hair, pressed against a wall where anyone could see, where any of her colleagues could  _ see,  _ and know she was no gentleman scholar but a demon, a woman, a  _ vampire,  _ fangs descended and the skin around her eyes black-laced. 

“Klaus—“ she gasped, feeling very nearly  _ swoony,  _ like she was not an all-powerful creature of the night but a green girl unknown to pleasure, weak with it. Practically delirious. 

“No,” he growled, and his eyes were yellow, his teeth sharp in his rosy mouth. She traced the edges of his poisonous canines with shaking fingertips, still gasping for air as he— as he  _ rutted  _ between her legs, there was no other word for it— rutted like he was an animal in heat and she  _ let him—  _ the old gods above must have approved, because outside the storm that had threatened to come over the city all morning bloomed with a crash of thunder that muffled the shriek she made when one of his hands left her hair to press between her legs, the heel right against where she ached the most. 

“No?” She repeated in half a daze, and thought about letting him  _ bite  _ her, something she knew from hearing the half-things whisper about felt  _ good,  _ as good as sex. Letting him infect her with his terrible poison, and then trusting him to cure her once more. 

(When had she begun to trust him so fully?) 

“Call me Nik,” he murmured in her ear, silken even with the barest scrape of his teeth on her throat like a threat. She went pliant as a rag doll to it for a second, before the words registered. “Pretend we are young again. Young to this life. Call me Nik. I’m tired of hiding.  _ Caroline.”  _

“Stop!” She hissed suddenly, going rigid and flinging him off of her with all her strength. He flew into the opposite wall, knocking a portrait down. She could not care, did not care— she closed her legs and tried not to let her knees be so weak, thighs trembling and cunt  _ hot,  _ feeling suffocated as she worked to quickly fix her whiskers, her crumpled ruff. “We are not children, Klaus!” She hissed. “We are not human, we are not  _ alive!”  _ She was insensate in all her fury, fresh with grief he did not understand. She could see that. He did not understand her anger, and how could he? 

He could not know what she had confirmed only this morning, when she was studying the notes of her human partner, Adrien Delacroix. 

He could not know that finally she’d come to an answer to the always-on-her-mind question— was there a way back? Was there a way to regain her humanity? 

(There was not. There never would be. She was a corpse frozen in time and animated with dark magics and nothing would change that.

All because of a boy who could not be loved by anyone who did not have any other choice.) 

“Caroline—“ he began, helpless, and she shook her head, blurring off on feet too fast for him to hope to follow. 

She’d always been better at running than he was at finding. 

She needed time. Another century might smother her grief enough to make the sight and smell of him more… palatable. 

 

***

  
  


**New Orleans, 1835**

 

“I’m glad you’ve come home.” Rebekah murmured, eyes closed. Caroline turned her head to look at her, arms above her head, one of their servants fanning her with a long palm leaf as a guard against the oppressive Louisiana heat. They were both dewy with pinkish sweat, pores ejecting water and blood both that stained their thin chemises. “Nik is positively insufferable without you.” 

Caroline sighed, and closed her own eyes, enjoying the simple pleasure of the fan’s stirred air and the familiar rose petals-and-ginger root scent of Rebekah’s favored hair rinse. They were as close as sisters— closer than sisters, maybe, since they’d known each other for eight hundred years. “He’s  _ positively insufferable _ all the time.” Caroline pointed out, dragging her fingers on the silk coverlet. 

“You’re right,” Rebekah admitted, and laced their fingers together, possessive in these small moments where their friendship and intimacy was the only uncomplicated piece of their centuries-long existence. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me something  _ interesting.”  _

Caroline hummed, and laughed, and slit her eyes open, making contact with the serving girl’s suddenly-sharpened gaze. She had lovely green eyes. “That will be all for now, Marie.” She said. “Forget what you’ve seen, forget what you’ve heard. Thank you.” The girl’s pupils constricted, grew, constricted again. She bobbed a curtsy and left, red hair and white apron strings the last they saw of her. 

Caroline sat up, stretching languorously, and walked to the window. “More interesting than your love for the  _ incredibly  _ handsome Marcellus?” It was a tease, and a sidelong one, but she knew it had hit the mark when Rebekah gasped softly, a little raggedly, and then flashed over to slam her pseudo-sister against the wall. 

“You can’t tell anyone.” Rebekah said, grip tight enough to shatter bone. “Caroline. I  _ mean _ it. Not a soul. Not  _ anyone.” _ It was urgency and desperation that had her so terrified. 

Caroline raised an eyebrow. “Do I look  _ stupid?”  _ She demanded. “Of course I won’t tell anyone.” She shook Rebekah off and took up her peignoir, wrapping it around herself even as she turned the doorknob. “You know he’ll find out sooner or later, though.” She said, and cast one more significant look over her shoulder. Rebekah slumped against the window, golden as an angel and limp with her hopelessness. “He always does.” 

“I know,” Rebekah whispered to herself, preemptively heartbroken. Caroline pretended not to hear her, and left. 

 

***

 

It was all going to end terribly. Caroline knew it in her bones. Klaus could not bear to be less than the most important person in the hearts of each person he himself held dear; this double betrayal would make him rage, full of wrath. Running interference would be useless, and besides— Caroline was tired of trying to temper Klaus’ fury. He was the sun, melting anything that got too close. Why did she have to try to prolong the inevitable? Why couldn’t she allow herself the luxury of burning, her wings of wax dripping away until she was left to drown in the vast oceans of his gaze? 

She was  _ home;  _ for so long she’d denied it to herself, the innate rightness that she felt when she was surrounded by the Mikaelson siblings— even (or, perhaps,  _ especially) _ Klaus. The sight of him, as ever, filled her with anger and bitterness and something else, something deep and tremulous that bore no name. Something she’d be content to ignore for as long as possible. 

It had been eight centuries, and she knew her resolve was wavering. 

“Klaus,” she said, striding down the grand staircase and adopting the brattish tone expected of a Southern Belle coquette. “I want to have a party!” She clapped her hands together and beamed, truly committing herself to the show of it all. The great performance. If she pretended to be this person for long enough, maybe she’d believe herself. 

It kept the servants from being too on-edge, anyway, which was good for morale. 

“What sort of party, love?” Klaus asked, hamming it up himself, turning the page on a novel and not looking up from whatever wisdom he found there, sprawled elegantly upon a settee. The favored white trousers of the day clung to his muscular thighs, and she was briefly caught by the sight before shaking herself, settling down on the opposite end in a rustle of taffeta petticoats and lace ruffles. She missed breeches; whenever she wore them she now thought of that snatch of moments in the French king’s halls, pressed indecently together and  _ almost  _ ready to give in to their… baser desires. 

“Oh, I don’t know! Something fun, with lots of people… maybe a masquerade!” She clasped her hands together and knew her pout struck a chord in his chest when she met his eyes, bright and dancing in amusement. He liked to pretend, too. 

They could be these people, when they were pretending— they could be  _ Klaus and Miss Caroline,  _ corseted and rouged and gloriously fake.  _ Happy  _ together. 

She  _ liked _ playing house. Liked it too much, probably. 

“Your wish is my command,” he told her, and went back to his novel. “Shall I write a letter to the bank, or will you take care of that?” He meant, of course,  _ do you want to play authentically or just skip straight to compulsion?  _ She hemmed and hawed for a moment, weighing her options, and then thought of the weight of such a letter in her hand, allowing her to  _ truly  _ feel like a debutante with a rich beau who’d do anything to see her happy. 

“Letter, please!” She decided, and, without thinking overly much about it, bent to kiss his cheek warmly, both of her hands finding purchase on those much-admired thighs to keep her balance, a whirl of hoops and golden curls and lace gloves that did nothing to hide the  _ firmness _ of him, the impossible heat. His cheek was rough beneath her lips, and she knew it was a mistake even as she did it, but could not stop then. 

Klaus breathed in once, short, sharp, ragged— Caroline throbbed between her legs at the sound and only barely stopped herself from using her inhuman speed to get as far away as possible from this situation she’d created. 

“I will have Marcellus draft the letter,” he murmured hoarsely, close enough still she could feel his breath upon her face. “He ought to learn how to conduct business affairs, if he’s to be…”  _ what,  _ exactly, Klaus did not say, but she could fill in the blanks easily enough.  _ One of us.  _

(Hope for Rebekah’s happiness was quickly being overtaken by the smothering surety that Klaus would never allow them to love each other more than they loved him.) 

Dizzily, Caroline nodded her head and swept an absent little curtsy, only because she could feel the maids’ eyes upon her. “A masquerade,” she said, steadying herself as she left, trying to be calm. “Perhaps in the style of Versailles!” 

Or the style of the Russians. Anything. Something to distract her, both from impending doom and from the heat in Klaus’ stare when he gazed at her, heat that matched what she felt all over whenever they were too close to each other. 

 

***

 

The ball was a blooming success, if a  _ blooming success  _ meant that only three guests were drained of their blood and had to be hidden in a spare closet. Caroline had long since given up on killing— she felt very nearly  _ protective  _ of mortals, with their charming minds always abuzz and their hearts thundering in their chests. 

Dances had changed over the centuries, but Klaus’ hateful elegance upon ballroom floors had not. They partnered for the Virginia Reel, the opening dance of the night, and Caroline felt almost nauseous with the brightness of his blue eyes. He was all too handsome. Just looking at him made her heart ache as if he’d plunged his hand into her chest and wrapped his fist around the organ. 

(The thought did not horrify her, as it should; it seemed instead a gruesome kind of intimate act, a parallel to consummation whose image had her burning even  _ hotter.  _ She thought of the scent in the room, Louisiana heat and Spanish moss and blood rushing— could he  _ smell  _ her? Scent her desire upon the air as if she were in heat? For surely that is how she felt— overcome. Debased. The entire party felt a farce, a mistake; every single rustle of her skirts had Klaus’ eyes getting brighter.) 

Across the room, Rebekah knocked back another julep, radiant in a pale pink gown with eyes too often falling upon Marcellus, strong and tall. 

Despite the benefit of almost a thousand years in this life, Caroline mused with a melancholic apathy borne from having seen the same things happen over and over again within the Mikaelson family unit, Rebekah was still a sweet dreamer on the inside, easily snared into a love beyond what she found from her siblings. 

“I think I need to sit down,” Caroline heard herself say abruptly, putting on airs as if she really  _ were  _ a Southern belle coming down with a fit of the vapors. Just another part of the role. Maybe she’d become an actress the next time she ran away to change her life. Change herself. 

Thinking of running made her legs ache to do it, hidden beneath her hoopskirt and the fine silk shipped straight from Saratoga that Klaus had bought for her latest ball gown, pale peach and dripping with lace. 

Klaus beaued her to the settee and stood by as she flapped her painted fan vigorously, absently, still pretending. 

“Would you like to take a turn in the gardens?” He asked, faux-solicitous, eyes gone hot as they traced over the curve of her off-the-shoulder neckline, watching her breasts heave with effort as she drew in deep breaths. “It may alleviate your…” Here he paused, and his mouth curved just at the corners. He was so beautiful.  _ “Heat exhaustion.”  _

Here was the point where she might say  _ why I could never walk out without a chaperone!  _ and pretend to be just what she appeared, a white-sashed virgin who was infatuated but not  _ indecorous.  _ Here was the out, the fork in the road, the end of the game they played. 

“Alright,” Caroline said, and rose, snapping her fan shut with a flick of her wrist and a sharp  _ crack!  _ that had the gazes of the society matrons flickering over, considering. Composing gossip in their minds that would be compelled  _ out  _ of them soon enough. 

 

***

 

The gardens were perhaps her favorite part of the Mikaelson estate; Klaus employed (or compelled) an entire fleet of master landscapers to keep it in condition, lush greens and dripping moss and perfectly-placed cobblestones along a path. 

The moon was almost full overhead; Klaus’ teeth seemed sharper for it. 

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said, just an observation. She leaned on him as they walked, arm in arm, down one of the winding pathways toward the hedge maze that Klaus had had installed. His tone was carefully cool and did not fool her for one second. 

“Yes.” She admitted freely; for all that they lived in the same home and saw each other every single day, she’d been hiding behind a veneer of civility, of delicacy. 

She was neither  _ civil  _ nor  _ delicate,  _ and Klaus knew it well. For months now, she’d been here in New Orleans, back in the bosom of the family she was both insider and outsider to; they ran into each other all the time, but their last real interaction had been in Paris, in a hallway, and Klaus had bared, if not his soul, then his underbelly, begging for something she had never thought he would crave. 

(She’d only very rarely called him  _ Nik;  _ it was a name saved for the earliest years of their existence, when she was too tired and thirsty and frightened to have her defenses up, a name murmured in the coldest mornings and darkest nights from a mouth that wanted to yawn and was trying its best not to.)

“You’re keeping secrets, too.” He was confident in this; she knew that he was aware of  _ something,  _ and only shrugged, humming. 

“Not my own secrets.” She answered, an evasion that spoke volumes. She’d feel worse about it if she thought he didn’t know. She knew, and he knew, and the serving girls who Rebekah was too free around knew, and it was only a matter of time until he  _ did something  _ about it. 

“You think me unfeeling.”

Caroline sighed, and stopped walking, choosing instead to face him as an equal, staring up into his savagely handsome features. His hair had darkened in the intervening years between  _ alive  _ and  _ undead;  _ where before he had long locks the color of wheat he now sported a short queue of auburn hair, tied off neatly with a plain black band at the base of his neck. She wondered, not for the first time, if it was the dark magicks or the lack of sunlight that caused the change. Her own hair was still fair, but had settled from  _ cornsilk  _ to  _ golden.  _

“I think you feel too much,” she corrected. “I think that you’re so afraid of being alone that you’re going to drive everyone away because you’re so unable to share them.” 

If she had been anyone else, she was sure he’d snap her neck for saying such things. As it was, he curved his hands around her cheeks and kissed her, his lips as soft as they had ever been and his hunger plain. 

“I know you’re in love with me.” She whispered, very quietly, into his mouth. He groaned with it, and was both gentleman and wolf in her arms. It reminded her of an old story- a story of a girl whose beloved would only be hers if she held him tight in her arms as he transformed from one bloodthirsty beast to the next. 

She knew Klaus was in love with her; she knew that he had loved her childishly when he’d been alive, loved her as a simple village boy from afar for nothing but her smile and her laugh. He had loathed her when they became what they were now, loathed her as a stand-in for all the rejection he’d ever felt, and that in itself had been a kind of love, too, because he’d been obsessed with it, with his fury. Finally he’d settled into an amazed kind of adoration, looking upon her like she was the finest treasure in the entire world even while he knew what kind of fiend she was, what kind of wrathful, aching thing hid behind her smile and her curls. 

(She had not loved him as long; she loved him as he was now, because of who he was, because he was so lonely and tortured and he had seen so much betrayal. She loved him close to her heart, in a place that always longed for him to be by her side. She loved what he was and what he could be and what he  _ had  _ been, mourned the boy whose first response had always been to protect and comfort his younger siblings even as she ached for the man he had become, jealous and haughty and  _ brilliant.  _ She loved him and she hated him; she wanted to stay by his side always and she wanted to find some deserted cave where he would not be able to find her. 

There were two Carolines- Caroline-the-girl, who adored Klaus for his few-and-far-between tendernesses, and Caroline-the-vampire, who relished in Klaus’ selfish violence, who wanted to open up the veins of the world and bathe in its blood right alongside him.

She was not sure which one of them scared her more.) 

Klaus made no accusations and asked nothing of her; he bore her down to the stones and knelt there above her, unheeding of grass stains and dirt as he brought her skirts up, up, up, until he could _ see  _ her, see where she was bare beneath all of her frippery,  _ smell  _ her with the senses of an apex predator, the veins around his eyes rippling and his eyes going yellow as his fangs descended, wicked and awful and  _ everything she wanted.  _

“Klaus,” she said,  _ whined,  _ spreading her thighs wider and arching her back, tearing off her dainty kid gloves and tossing them somewhere into the dark, unheeding of their cost and of whoever would discover them later as they trimmed the hedges. “Klaus, please-”  _ please what?  _ the cynical part of her brain asked. He was already  _ doing it,  _ drawing up her stockinged legs so he could kiss up the inside of her thigh, and she was insensate, she was wild for it- she hated him for making her thus and adored him for the miraculous touch of his lips on her skin, nearer and nearer to where she  _ needed him.  _

It had been  _ so long.  _ An eternity. She had gone an eternity without  _ this,  _ without  _ him,  _ chasing down facsimiles of his wit and his grin and his broad shoulders, poor substitutes for the real thing, raindrops when she needed a flood. 

He pressed his mouth to her and it was a revelation; the pleasure washed over her like a wave and she could feel it rushing through her veins from the top of her head to the very tips of her toes. Nothing had ever been so good. Nothing would ever be so good again- her expectations had been shattered and now the world was changed. 

And the worst part was that he wasn’t even that  _ good,  _ technically. He lapped at her ravenously, but he was not some Casanova with the talent of Eros; what made it life-changing was the fact that it was  _ him,  _ and not some human or lesser vampire. It was Klaus’ lovely hair she clutched in her hands, and it was Klaus’ teeth scraping over her, and it was Klaus’ fingers, long and aristocratic despite their humble beginnings in an unnamed village eight hundred years ago, curving up inside of her and  _ curling,  _ pressing right where she wanted them to. 

“Damn you,” Caroline managed to say, dreamy-voiced and cotton-minded, and then she shook apart with it, overloaded with a feeling like pure fire in the center of her, white-hot and too-good. 

Klaus hummed, pleased, right up between her legs before he pulled away, coming up to lay his head upon her heaving chest. Everything felt close and hot and golden as she fluttered with the aftershocks. 

“Stay with me.” Klaus whispered, and did not ask or order. “Stay, Caroline.” 

She didn’t reply; she knew what the morning would bring. 

She had already decided to leave before the party had even been conceived of; she had decided when she’d seen Rebekah’s gaze following Marcellus, and known what it would mean. What Klaus would  _ do.  _

She was tired of watching him destroy everything. She was tired of being ashamed about how it didn’t change anything, for her. 

Caroline was just  _ tired. _

 

***

 

**Chicago, 1922**

 

“I  _ love  _ this century!” Caroline shouted above the mad melee of jazz music and laughter, knocking back another glass of champagne. “The women are so  _ free,  _ so daring— could you have imagined this? All those years ago? Hell, even just a handful of years ago?” She shone under the lights, adorned in strands of glass beads and ropes of diamonds, constantly in motion so as to give off the general effect of being faceted like a diamond herself, glinting. What delicious decadence this was, with an underbelly of  _ bite _ and  _ change _ that outshone even the Vatican in the time of the second Borgia pope- her belly was full of champagne and her veins of hot blood, and Caroline was not sure she ever wanted this night to end. 

Elijah, for his part, smiled his Mona Lisa smile and took a small sip of his own drink, leaning against the wall looking both uncomfortable and debonair— the standard for the eldest (the eldest currently undaggered, anyway) Mikaelson. 

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” he murmured. Caroline laughed and dragged him onto the dance floor, kicking her legs and waving her arms madly in the new-fangled dance craze that had been sweeping the city, a far cry from the sedate dances they’d once performed together in the de Martel castle, when only their quick predator brains had saved them from exposing themselves as illiterate, ill-mannered beasts. 

“I could stay here forever!” She told him, and wished for a fleeting second that it was he whom she’d been thrown together with by Esther so long ago. Perhaps she could’ve learned to love Elijah and allowed herself to be loved in return— perhaps for his gentlemanly facade she could’ve fooled herself into thinking that this life was everything she could have ever hoped for. 

Klaus’ face flashed in her mind, though, and reminded her of the turbulence she’d always felt with his eyes upon her, whether they were blue or yellow. He’d been so lovely even as a human, always lingering on the edges of her field of vision. She’d been aware of him even then, though it was not an  _ infatuation _ for her as it had been for Klaus. He’d been insignificant, just another handsome Mikaelson running about. Nobody, to her busy and simple mind. 

“I am glad you feel that way.” Elijah said, bending to speak in her ear, velvet-toned and apologetic so that she knew what he’d say before he said it. “However, I must beg your forgiveness and take leave of you, Caroline. I wish to be elsewhere… somewhere untouched by this modernity, this post-war fervor.” He showed his regret upon his face like a mask, and she knew that he was weary of this world, this life, in a deeper way than she herself could ever be. He’d known so much heartache, so much disaster, all at the hands of his brothers, and yet he could not forsake them. Could not separate his loving from his loathing. 

She did not beg him to stay, though she thought for a moment about it. She’d missed him. She missed  _ all _ of them— Rebekah, her stand-in sister with all the sweetness of a flower and sting of a bee. Kol, who never failed to make her laugh and stir her from apathy to blazing emotion. Finn, who was dry as dust but was easy to be around, quietly companionable in a way the other Mikaelsons were not. 

And Klaus. Klaus, who she could not even describe. Who set her mind awhirl and her veins aflame. Klaus, who was infinitely at home in whatever locale and time she found him in, a lounging predator of a king with dominion over everything, everyone. 

Klaus, who she ached for so fiercely that sometimes she wished him dead, just so she knew she’d be safe from the darkest and lightest parts of her heart, the parts that sheltered shards of him, memories and impressions. His mocking laugh. His burning eyes. His soft killer’s hands. His rough burr of a silken voice.  _ Klaus.  _

“I’ll miss you.” She said, low and serious, before forcing herself to laugh again, injecting levity back between them. “And  _ you’ll  _ miss Chicago! You’ll see!” He allowed some quick-footed human to cut between them and she whirled away with him, fast enough that when she turned back to look, Elijah was gone, the space where he’d been occupied by a sleek-haired mind in embroidered velveteen. 

Alone again, with the world at her feet. 

 

***

 

A hundred years had made Klaus…  _ debonair.  _ His sharply-cut suit fit like a sheath might a knife, and Caroline saw him before he saw her, across the crowded dance floor of the Green Mill. It was the place to be, especially on a night like tonight; governors and gangsters all crammed into the same space, breathing the same air, drinking the same illicit liquor. 

Rebekah glowed, gleamed, as polished as a pearl even with her eyes too-wide and her hands shaking when they weren’t wrapped around a glass of  _ something.  _ The absence of Marcellus was glaring, terrible; they had the look on their faces they only got when they had recently run for their lives. 

(Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Caroline cursed the names  _ Esther and Mikael.)  _

He greeted her with a grin and accepted the kiss she pressed to the corner of his mouth graciously, one of her gloved hands resting on his shoulder. They’d adjourned to a booth like a couple of rotten eggs, tucked up together with a drink in their hands. As ever, proximity was intoxicating; she’d been buzzing with it since she’d seen him, and now could not take her eyes off of him, glancing through her lashes at his sharp haircut, his perfectly-knotted tie. He was the handsomest jazz hound in the joint; Caroline felt possessive of him, pleased that she was the only woman he seemed to see. 

The woman onstage crooned a song about missing your lover. The air was thick with heat and cigarette smoke and  _ longing,  _ and Caroline’s unbeating heart ached. 

“I like this,” Klaus said, and beneath the table ran his knuckles up her bared thigh, stroking companionably over her garter. He looked exhausted. She’d never seen him look so  _ tired.  _ So joyless. He was so handsome, and his eyes were so sad.  

Well— not in a thousand years, anyway. 

“This?” Caroline repeated, and took a long swallow of champagne. Across the room, Rebekah stroked Stefan Salvatore’s face. Caroline wondered when (or  _ if)  _ Rebekah would fall in love with a man who wasn’t doomed to break her heart. 

(She supposed she was one to talk, though.) 

“Your liberation.” Klaus clarified, and curled his fingers into the top of her stocking, just holding her like that. She remembered being tucked beneath his chin like a child, whispering  _ I missed you, Nik  _ and meaning  _ I have been missing you my entire unlife.  _

“Another role to play,” Caroline shrugged. Sometimes she was tired of being herself, tired of being all the different versions of herself. “This one is at least more entertaining than some of the others have been.” 

“Do you miss the old village?” The wistfulness in his tone startled her as much as the non-sequitur. 

“You mean ‘do I miss being human?’” She corrected him. He tipped his drink to her as if to say  _ you’re right.  _ She heaved a sigh and felt every single one of her nine hundred and forty seven years. “Do you remember how many women died in childbirth in our village?” She asked him, countering his question with a question of her own. “How many people did you know that were  _ old?” _ She drained her glass. 

“Caroline,” Klaus said, and she rose, tugging her leg from his grip. 

“Where is Marcellus, Klaus?” Caroline asked, and left him sitting there, expression shuttered, a booth away from Al Capone, surrounded on all sides by screaming, roaring humanity. 

 

***

 

The forgotten Original. 

This was how she’d be remembered- or not. It had been almost a thousand years of  _ this,  _ and she had never found a place where she felt entirely safe, entirely  _ at home.  _ She’d gone a thousand years and never sired a single other, never passed on the dubious  _ gift  _ of vampirism. For all the world knew, she was just another vampire, old but not  _ ancient,  _ powerful but not  _ truly immortal.  _

She sighed, and looked at herself in the mirror above the sink, taking in the smeared lipstick and bloodied teeth and bobbed hair. 

_ Do you miss the old village?  _ Klaus had asked, and meant something else entirely, but the truth was that she  _ did.  _ She missed the woods, missed the stars, missed the lake and scent of early spring. 

Maybe that’s what she needed. To make her  _ own  _ home, instead of trying to fit herself into a place that did not belong to her. 

Maybe she needed to go  _ home.  _

Maybe.

 

***

 

**Mystic Falls, 2011**

 

They’d sent her to distract him again. Klaus knew it, undeniably, and yet he was in a joyful mood, cajoling and bright. One of his manias; she knew that it would end soon enough, in bloodshed or tears or both. 

“I have never understood your fanaticism for Americans, love.” Klaus said, cocking his head and looking at her like she was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen. It had been nearly ninety years since she’d been on the receiving end of that look, and for a second Caroline thrilled like a girl of seventeen, not at all like the millenia-old vampire she was. 

“They’re spunky. Self-starting. I like the way they think, the way they behave. Full of hope, full of life.” She shrugged, and knew that he understood, because he always understood. Just as she always understood him. For better or worse. 

“Then why not go to California? New York City?” He pressed, double-intentioned. She smiled sardonically. 

“You just want me to leave Mystic Falls because you know I won’t stand for what you’re trying to do to these kids.” She thought fondly of all of them- cerulean-eyed Matt, eternally alone Elena, strong Bonnie, hotheaded Tyler. Her little brood of mortals, the closest thing to children she’d ever had. She’d watched them as pre-pubescent messes, observed their transition into young adulthood, stood by and saw Elena’s life get turned upside-down, Bonnie’s heart breaking over her grandmother, Tyler get beaten to a pulp by both life and his father, Matt be forced into early adulthood by his negligent mother. 

Klaus smiled tightly. “Partially.” He confessed, incorrigible. “I will have the doppelganger’s blood,” he told her. “You know this. You have watched me search for a thousand years. You know I will not be denied.” 

Caroline knew. She had known it from the first time she’d seen Elena, young and doe-eyed with features that she had not seen since she’d been a girl herself, on sweet, dead Tatia. 

(Though she sometimes could feel the immortal girl’s eyes on her in the quiet, dark moments, usually in some ballroom or darkened club or another, she had never had the unique  _ pleasure  _ of meeting Katarina Petrova, the doppelgänger who had eluded him for so long.) 

“What if you… didn’t?” She asked him, and had to turn away, because she was not brave enough to ask for this and look upon his face at the same time. “What if we left Mystic Falls and went somewhere else? Together.” 

“Caroline…” It was a sigh, long-suffering and intrigued all at once. 

“I know you’re in love with me,” she told him, echoing her own words from centuries ago now— confessing something with the repetition. She’d never answered his own silent, matching accusation, after all. 

She’d not known  _ how  _ to, then. 

Now, she knew. 

There had been other men, and even women— there had been bright-eyed gamines and brilliant geniuses and ivory-skinned ingenues. 

There had been those who called up sweet fondness from her heart, those who drove her wild with passion, those whose loss still ached keenly within her breast like a wound. 

There had been no other Niklaus Mikaelson. 

After over a thousand years, Caroline had to admit that there never  _ would  _ be another Niklaus Mikaelson. 

“Give up all this  _ shit,”  _ she cried out, finally allowing herself to break from the quivering, proud whisper she’d used before. Bold the way she’d always been, but with the license for vulgarity handed out to every woman of this glorious new age. “Leave it all behind, come with me, we could go  _ anywhere,  _ Klaus. Just as long as we’re  _ together.” _

His touch did not startle her— she shook and buried her face into her hands and he wrapped his elegant, killer’s hands around her wrists, sheltered her in his arms, buried his face into her hair and just breathed raggedly into it for several long moments. 

“I have wanted to hear you say that for a very long time.” He said quietly, after an eternity of silence, and then his arms were no longer around her and he was gone with nothing but a rustle of the wind. 

He did not have to say  _ I can’t,  _ because she heard it loud and clear in his absence. 

“May the gods  _ damn  _ you, Nik.” She wept once, and then straightened, drawing her shoulders back and erasing all grief and embarrassment from her posture. 

She’d never really thought he’d pick her, anyway. 

There was no time to weep. 

 

***

 

Jenna died. 

Elena died. 

Jules died. 

Caroline looked at Klaus, writhing and screaming with the transformation yet somehow  _ joyful,  _ and closed her eyes. 

She wished she didn’t feel triumph, on his behalf. 

She wished she could hate him. 

She wished many, many things. 

 

***

 

“They betrayed me.” 

Caroline did not pause, and instead kept walking, face turned up and catching the moonlight as she gazed at the sky, picking out constellations. She’d not seen Klaus since the ritual, had preferred instead to spend her time doing damage control, wandering the woods when she could get away. 

She’d thought that Mystic Falls would be the answer to her loneliness; she’d spent decades on the fringes, watching the Founding Families and their progeny, entangling herself in their lives in the smallest ways, never being part of the action. 

She’d thought that revealing herself to Bonnie and Elena would make her feel less of an outsider; in truth, she felt more alien now than she ever had before. Too ancient to be a true confidante to them, too young to be a matronly figure, too  _ Caroline  _ to be a  _ friend.  _ She loved them, yes; loved them and wanted to protect them, to shield them from this life, which had torn her to pieces. 

“You want too much from people.” She told him in response, echoed by a hooting owl perched in a tree high above them. Klaus laughed, acidic and humorless. 

“You want to change me, to ask me to be someone I am not, and you think that  _ I  _ ask too much?” He didn’t have to explain what he meant; she knew he was referring to her plea, her declaration, her self-destruction of all the pride left in her heart. 

It was too much to bear. 

She whirled upon him, and wanted to tear his handsome face to ribbons with her fingernails, wanted to tear out his throat,  _ wanted.  _

(What a horror she was.)

She whirled upon him and was alone, Klaus gone like he had never been there in the first place. The woods felt empty. Everything felt empty. 

Caroline’s chest was hollow, and she leaned against a thick oak tree, breathing. 

 

***

 

**Mystic Falls, 2014**

 

“Matt!” Caroline bellowed. “Matt!  _ Matt!”  _ She was getting weary of all this; she was non-essential to the plot of the twisting, turning soap opera that was  _ The Young and The Undead of Mystic Falls.  _ Even her search efforts were half-hearted; honestly, if poor Matt hadn’t gotten killed by  _ now,  _ she thought the odds were in his favor for survival. 

“Hello, love.” 

Caroline froze, and then growled, rolling her eyes. “Seriously?” Elena and Bonnie should’ve never introduced her to  _ Grey’s Anatomy.  _ Her speech patterns were far and away from the woman who’d charmed King Charles of France so many centuries ago as a result. 

Klaus stood tall and handsome; spitefully, he seemed to have gotten even  _ handsomer  _ in the last three years, as if he  _ needed  _ to be more attractive than he already was. She loathed him. She loathed  _ herself,  _ and the vicious swooping in her stomach she felt when she looked at him. 

“No.” She said, and whooshed off, still bellowing Matt’s name, only now with renewed vigor born from an intense desire to not engage with her stupid not-ex. 

“Now, honestly, is that any way to treat your…” Klaus trailed off, pointedly thoughtful. She rolled her eyes again. 

“My  _ what?”  _ She snapped. “My tormentor?” 

Klaus grinned, a weaponized bit of gorgeous that hit her  _ right  _ in the sex drive. Her lizard brain said  _ open your legs.  _ Her brain brain said  _ punch him in the face.  _

“What about  _ your husband?” _ He asked, teeth  _ gleaming  _ in the sunlight, sinister and symmetrical and  _ ridiculous.  _ He was  _ ridiculous.  _

Caroline blinked, opening her mouth, and then thought better of it, shutting her mouth again. “Klaus, I  _ really  _ don’t have time for this…” she waved a hand, indicating his entire personage.  _ “You.”  _

Klaus laughed merrily. “‘This me?’” He quoted, and came closer. 

“Sorry,” she said, all venom. “Matt’s buried alive. No time to chat.” She went to run away again, only to be caught by the wrist. 

“Are you not the least bit curious why I’m here?” He played at petulance, affecting a smirk that told her he was  _ relishing  _ this. 

“I literally just whooshed at the sight of your face, so, uh,  _ no.”  _ It had a distinct air of  _ duh  _ around it- Caroline was clearly spending too much time playing den mother to a passel of moody teenagers. Klaus stroked his thumb over her ulna. She wanted to break his nose and also kiss his face off. It was terrible. 

“Damon Salvatore informed me that Katarina Petrova has made a… tragic turn.” 

Caroline rolled her eyes. “So, you're here to gloat over her corpse-to-be? Delight in the closure of five hundred years of revenge.  _ Great. _ I'm even less interested.” 

She broke from his grip and sped away, knowing he was right on her heels,  _ frothing  _ with self-importance and malicious glee and that same old adoration. She was so tired of running away from Klaus Mikaelson. 

“Matt!” She shouted, desperation thready in her voice more from the want of avoiding Klaus than any real fear for Matt’s fate. “Matt, where are you?” 

“Is the offer still open?” Klaus, again. 

“I don’t know what you mean.” She denied, almost by rote. It felt like they’d been playing this game for a very, very long time. She was tired of playing. She was tired of games. 

“Yes you do.” 

Caroline exhaled roughly through her nose and glared at him. “You can’t do this to me. You can’t just show up while my friend’s missing and in danger.” 

Klaus laughed. His eyes twinkled. “You know, while you've been vamping off in all the wrong directions, I heard Matt's distant and desperate screams.” 

Caroline sharpened. “Where?” 

Klaus stuck his hands into the pockets of his jacket and smiled his boyish smile at her, the one that never failed to make her nostalgic for the days of roughly-hewn homespun shifts and the smell of unwashed bodies and goats. “Don't worry love, I've got it covered. Trust me, He'll be quite happy with his rescuer.” 

This undoubtedly meant he’d sent Rebekah. Caroline wondered when she’d get to see a day where Rebekah Mikaelson made sound romantic decisions. She felt very elder-sisterish, long-suffering and exasperated. 

“So the quarterback has been saved. What now?” The sunlight felt wonderful on her skin. It was a startling little realization that took her from the moment, from her irritation, made her feel almost-generous. 

“Don't you have a dying girl you need to go punish for her sins?” The thought of Katarina dying brought Caroline no small amount of pleasure; still, the loss of the Sheriff was still fresh in her mind, raw in her heart. She did not relish in death. Not now. Not anymore. Mortals had always been beings to fascinate her, things for her to pity and watch over. Inserting herself into their lives the way she had here in Mystic Falls made her more conscious that they had  _ worth,  _ that they had dreams and hopes and fears just as she did. 

“I do.” Klaus agreed, nodding, never taking his eyes from her face. “But I won’t. For you.” He said it like a gift; his silver tongue shone in those words. 

Dubiously, she retorted, “so you came all the way to Mystic Falls to back off when I tell you to?” 

“No. I came all the way to Mystic Falls to gloat over a corpse-to-be, as you so poetically put it, but I will leave - minus the gloating - in return for one, small thing.” Now  _ that  _ was the Klaus she’d known since the world was young. Caroline rolled her eyes; she was certain that they’d get stuck that way one day, and it would be all Klaus’ fault. Always bargaining. 

“And what is that?” She asked, game enough. Klaus stepped closer still. The heat of him made it hard for her to think straight. 

“I want your confession.” He spoke the words as if they were love letters made air; he spoke and looked in her eyes with terrible intensity, and she  _ ached.  _

“My confession? I didn’t do anything. Confession about what?” She was annoyed with the riddle-speak, and impatient, wanting to get to the bottom of this so she could go back to pretending Klaus Mikaelson didn’t exist. 

“Me. As soon as we're done here, I'm going to walk away and I'm never coming back. You'll never again have to look me in the eye and cover our connection with hostility or revulsion. And you'll never have to loathe the darkest parts of yourself that care for me, in spite of all I've done. I will be gone and you will be free. I just want you to be honest with me.” 

Caroline stopped. Stopped moving, stopped breathing, stopped blinking. His words took a long moment to register. 

How could one man be so infuriating? How could a being be both brilliant and so  _ stupid?  _

She reached out with one steady hand and curled her fist up in the fabric of his shirt, clenching it tight. He was so  _ ridiculous.  _ He got  _ more  _ ridiculous by the year, impossibly. 

She  _ couldn’t stand him.  _

“No.” Caroline said, clear and strong. Klaus’ brows furrowed, and his intensity and his bravado fell away. “Klaus,  _ I love you.”  _ She stated, enunciating almost to the point of being obnoxious, and watched hope come onto his face like the sunset rising over the horizon. He actually had the audacity to look  _ surprised.  _ “I don’t  _ want  _ you to go. I want you to…” She made a noise of frustration. “I want you to stop sabotaging yourself. I want you to stop hurting yourself by hurting everyone you love. I want you to be  _ happy.”  _ She dragged him closer to her, until their foreheads were touching and all she could see was  _ blue.  _

Klaus was very still for a moment. 

In the next moment, Caroline found herself pressed to a tree, Klaus’ hands tearing her blouse open with the vehemence of a thousand years spent denying themselves this final consummation. This connection. 

She held him to her with her thighs around his waist, her hands tangled in his hair, and let herself be consumed by his kisses, throbbing inside with the pure pleasure of it, all hunger and thirst and  _ lust  _ even as Klaus tore her panties to shreds, tossing the ruined scrap of lace aside like so much insignifiance. Everything was Klaus. Everything was  _ yes.  _ Everything was the press of his cock against her, the breathless, awful pleasure of his thick length entering her, pressing and pressing until he was fully  _ inside,  _ until they were joined entirely, and she could think of nothing but that, his toothsome kisses and frantic thrusts. 

“Caroline,” Klaus said, almost a growl. “Caroline, Caroline, Caroline.” She curled her hands into the nape of his neck, tucked her face up into his throat, brushed her eyelashes over the tender skin at the hinge of his jaw. He touched her like she was a miracle. He always had. 

“Hmm?” She mumbled, mindless with it. Dumb with it. Gone out of her  _ mind  _ with it, because everything was so good. Better even than the night he’d put his mouth on her in the garden, a night she remembered in visceral clarity, all peach silk and Spanish moss and desire. 

“Caroline, please-” he gasped, and fought to draw back from her grip enough to look her in the eyes, halfway pulled out and gone too still for her liking. She glared, and he stroked a hand over her mussed curls. 

“Marry me,” he said, serious as the grave. Serious as she’d ever seen him. 

“What?” She all but shrieked, trying to draw him back in, draw him closer, make him  _ move.  _ He wouldn’t be moved, though, and instead repeated himself. 

_ “Marry  _ me.” It was a demand, and half a plea. As if there was anything else she would say except  _ yes.  _ As if she’d spent the last thousand years  _ not  _ in hopeless love with him. 

_ “Damn you,  _ yes!” Caroline shouted, and then again when he drew back even further and rocked forward with force, thrusting against her so hard she saw stars, her eyes rolling back for an entirely different reason than they had earlier. 

“Come for me,” Klaus demanded, possessive of it. Possessive of  _ her.  _ She wished she wasn’t as terribly weak for it as she was. 

“Okay,” she said faintly, and did, holding him close until he followed her over the edge. 

They sank to the ground, gasping, tangled together. 

“Mrs. Caroline Mikaelson.” Klaus said it musingly, stroking gentle fingers over her bare side. She shivered, and laughed at him. 

“You’re ridiculous.” She said, fondly. 

“And soon I’ll be your ridiculous husband.” He replied, gloating. 

Caroline did not respond, hiding her smile in his chest. 

She’d been born in a warm little hall on a pile of furs, and spent the first seventeen years of her life in obscurity, Caroline Willemdöttir. 

She’d spent the following one thousand and twenty two years as a legend, a figure from myth, Caroline Forbes. 

She’d thought that she’d quite like to spend the  _ next  _ thousand years as Caroline Mikaelson. 


End file.
